Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell

by Blood Will Tell(lit)

  "How the hell are you! Ha HAH!" His laugh was automatic, like a spasm or a tic, used to punctuate. He sounded like Woody Woodpecker.

  Kate held her breath but Ekaterina only recovered her hand and nodded again, twice as frostily this time. "Mr.--" She hesitated for so long that he rushed to supply the rest. "Mathisen, Lew Mathisen," he said,

  "ha HAH!"

  A third thin smile, as frosty as the first two. "Of course. Mr.

  Samithen."

  It was a Force 10 Arctic gale, impossible to mistake. Johnny's eyes widened. Jack ate faster. Kate waited, fatalistic, for Mathisen to dig himself in even deeper.

  He was smart enough not to correct Ekaterina. Instead, he assumed an expression of deep concern, and said, "Say, it's a damn shame about Sarah, isn't it? Harvey just told me, and I can't say how sorry I am. I know how much you're going to miss her." He smiled again, showing off six thousand dollars' worth of dental work in the upper incisors alone, and managed to restrain the laugh this time.

  At that Kate thought Ekaterina would say something and she braced for it, but just then John King looked over and saw Jack. "Morgan," he growled. His eyes traveled past Jack to Kate. "Shugak." He was square-headed, thickset and blond, wearing the same mustard-yellow, silver-toed cowboy boots Kate had seen in March. He looked exactly what he was, a roughneck who had started out throwing the chain on a rig floor in Louisiana and ended up, to his own and everyone else's bewilderment, not to say consternation, at the head of the board room of Royal Petroleum Company, throwing his weight around.

  "Hello, King," Kate said, leaping into Ekaterina's frozen silence with foolhardy abandon. "You get that wellhead off Tode Point yet?"

  Johnny looked puzzled. Jack choked on his veal and had recourse to his Chianti. Ekaterina looked on Kate with what might actually have been approval.

  King's scowl deepened. Without answering he seated his date, a brunette with a face so artificially smooth you could skate on it and eyes so opaque it was hard to tell their color. There was a wide gold band on her left hand, the only thing about her that surprised Kate. The oil man sat down next to the brunette without introducing her, folded thick arms across his chest and glowered at Lew Mathisen beneath lowered brows.

  "And Kate, too, by God," Lew Mathisen said, "how'd we get so lucky, ha HAH!" He reached out and Kate gave him a bright smile across a full fork, thereby occupying both hand and mouth so she would have to neither shake his hand nor reply.

  "Hello, emaa," Axenia said from behind him, her smile containing only a trifle less wattage. "Sorry we're late. Hi, Kate." "Axenia," Kate said,

  "hi. I didn't know you were coming." "I called her this afternoon,"

  Ekaterina said.

  "Hey, babe," Lew said, and gave Axenia an exuberant kiss. "What are you doing here?"

  "I'm meeting my grandmother for dinner." She put her arm around his neck and kissed him back with interest, when she was done looking a clear challenge first at her grandmother, then at her cousin. Kate thought if Ekaterina stiffened any more she might snap in half where she sat.

  A short, stout man with a moon face and shiny black hair beamed over Axenia's shoulder. "It's my fault, Ekaterina. Axenia said I'd get a free meal if I tagged along, so I made her wait for me. Hi, Kate."

  "Hello, Billy." Billy Mike had succeeded Ekaterina in the position of tribal chief of the Niniltna Native Association only because Ekaterina had refused to run for a fourth five year term. He was also one of the four surviving Niniltna board members. Ekaterina, then Harvey, now Billy. Kate wondered when Enakenty was going to show up.

  "And Billy, too, great to see you again!" Mathisen smacked his hands together. "Well, isn't this great, ha HAH! Can we buy you nice folks a drink? Honey, bring my good friends here a bottle of whatever they're drinking. And another one for us while you're at it." As if the idea had just occurred to him, he said, "Say, why don't we push our tables together? Make a party of it, ha HAH!"

  "No, thank you," Ekaterina said clearly.

  Johnny, who had inherited his brains from his father, began shovelling in pasta in a manner reminiscent of a steam shovel excavating a gravel pit.

  "Oh, hey, Lew," Jack said, "ah, we're already halfway through our dinners here, let's save it for another time, okay?"

  "Well, hell, you can drink, can't you, ha HAH? Honey, can we slide these tables together, what do you think? Ha HAH!"

  Kate leaned over to whisper in Ekaterina's ear. "Would you like to leave?"

  Ekaterina, straight-backed in her chair, looking neither to the left nor to the right, conveyed a healthy portion of lasagna to her mouth without replying.

  "Since they're almost done," Axenia said, "maybe Billy and I should join you instead."

  "Well, if you're sure," Mathisen said, disappointed. "Honey? Honey?

  Could we have a couple more chairs and place settings here? Fine! Well, great to see you, Ekaterina, we'll be seeing you all at the convention, ha HAH!" He waved a hand at Ekaterina's table and went back to his own.

  Billy, smarter than Axenia, or perhaps just less in need of proving a point, declined the invitation to join Mathisen's party and pulled up a chair between Ekaterina and Kate.

  The waitress arrived with two bottles of Chianti. Behind her came the couple who would be taking the table on the other side of Jack's party.

  "Oh fuck," said Jack under his breath.

  "Oh fuck," said Johnny, way under his.

  "Hello, Jane," said Kate, and wondered why very thin people always looked so peevish. Probably hunger.

  The tall towhead's skin matched the color of her hair. The lids of her blue eyes were weighed down beneath thick layers of shadow, liner and mascara, only emphasizing the malevolent expression in them. She responded to Kate's greeting by snapping at Jack, "Is she staying with you?"

  Jack, more relaxed now that the attack was directed his way, gave an equable nod, his face displaying nothing more than a polite disinterest in Jane's next words. Next to Kate, Johnny was strung as tight as a wire, and she couldn't resist a brief touch of his shoulder. "Relax," she mouthed. "Everything's okay."

  Jane's eyes narrowed. "Get your hands off my son!"

  "Jane." Jack's voice was deep and hard. "Back off."

  Kate gave Jane her sweetest and most dangerous smile.

  The line of Jane's mouth tightened, and then relaxed. Her eyes snapped with malicious triumph. "I guess I'll have something to say to the judge about the degenerate home life you're providing for my son," she told Jack. "I'll wind up with full custody for sure this time. You should pick your whores more carefully, Jack."

  "Jane." Jack's voice lashed out. "I said, back off."

  Conversation in the restaurant slowed and heads turned in their direction. From the next table, Axenia smiled at Kate. It wasn't a friendly smile. Jack looked angry. Johnny shrank down into a miserable huddle. Into the growing silence Ekaterina leaned over to whisper in Kate's ear. "Would you like to leave?"

  Their eyes met for a long, pregnant moment. Somewhere deep down Kate felt a bubble of frantic laughter rise to match the hilarity she could see in Ekaterina's eyes, and together they burst out laughing.

  Jane's colorless skin flushed a dark, congested red right up to the roots of her colorless hair and her eyes narrowed to slits. Her date, a plump, uneasy man hiding behind a pair of glasses with thick tortoiseshell rims, tugged at her elbow. "Jane. Come on."

  Jane glared at him. "Yes, let's. The food's much better at Sorrento's anyway." She turned on her heel. Over her shoulder she said to Jack, the sneer back, "See you in court."

  The remark was largely wasted since Jack could barely hear her over Kate and Ekaterina, who were still laughing as Jane stalked out the door.

  When the laughter had died down to the occasional hysterical hiccup, Jack judged it time to produce his piece de resistance, tickets to that evening's performance of the Whale Fat Follies. They adjourned forthwith to Spenard and the Fly By Night Club, where for the next three hours they were accosted by no
thing more serious than woolly mammoths, tap-dancing outhouses and hum pies from hell. It wasn't until after Jack was asleep that night that Kate had time to wonder why the president and chief executive officer of Royal Petroleum Company was dining with a member of the Niniltna Native Association board, in company with Mathisen, one of the most notoriously corrupt lobbyists in the history of Alaskan politics.

  The board member's motivations were unambiguous, as best exemplified by the watch Harvey had been wearing. She wondered who had given it to him, and decided it had probably been Mathisen, but she was willing to bet the funds for it could be traced back to John King by way of a lobbyist's fee.

  She hadn't had a lot to do with Lew Mathisen, but she knew of him by reputation. Everyone did; he was on retainer for half the Outside corporations doing business in the state. RPetco was one of them.

  The previous spring, Kate had worked for John King in Prudhoe Bay, tracking down a cocaine dealer who had been putting his half of the oil field into substance abuse orbit for months, a dealer his in-house security forces had been unable to apprehend. Kate had apprehended the dealer and the dealer's organization, as well as putting a halt to a sideline in the illegal obtaining and selling of Alaska Native artifacts from an archaeological site on the Arctic coastline. The job had resulted in satisfaction for John King and a more than satisfactory financial gain for herself. Oil companies might be immoral monoliths concerned only with making money, but they sure paid well. In fact, Kate had left RPetco with everyone except for the security chief in a more or less happy frame of mind, and she wondered why King had been so unhappy to see her at the restaurant this evening. She wondered if it had something to do with the wellhead on Tode Point, the remains of an unlawfully drilled test hole on the archaeological site. Maybe it was still there, in spite of King's agreement to move it. Maybe he had a guilty conscience over it, and that accounted for his surly behavior.

  Somehow, Kate didn't think so.

  It was evident that Axenia was on terms of intimacy with the lobbyist, who had to be at least thirty years older and infinitely wiser than her cousin in the ways of the world. Terms intimate enough that she would abandon her grandmother's company for his, in a public display of tacit disrespect that commanded not only Kate's dismay, but a small, secret, sneaking sense of awed admiration as well.

  Two years before Axenia had begged Kate to get her out of the Park, away from Niniltna and a love affair gone bad and a lifestyle she loathed.

  Unlike Kate, Axenia yearned for the bright lights of the big city.

  Against Ekaterina's wishes, Kate had found her cousin a job with Kate's old employer, the Anchorage District Attorney's office. They had met twice the previous spring when Kate had been working for RPetco. Axenia hadn't talked much about herself then, and Kate had left it alone, old enough to know that when pushed, the first instinct of the young is to push back, hard.

  It might be time to change tactics.

  She thought again of Axenia and Mathisen's embrace over the dinner table. Beauty and the Beast.

  It might be more than time.

  THREE.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING KATE AND MUTT WENT FOR A walk down the Coastal Trail. Johnny went with them.

  The bike path ran between Jack's townhouse and Westch ester Lagoon, splitting at the western edge of the lagoon. The right fork led uptown to Second Avenue. They took the left fork, past the KENI radio tower and through the tunnel beneath the Alaska Railroad tracks to emerge on Knik Arm. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the sun wasn't high enough yet to give it any color. Cook Inlet lay like a sheet of gray glass, stretching south to where sight ended and imagination began.

  "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish I was in school."

  Kate grinned. "Thanks a lot."

  Johnny flushed in the awkward way of an adolescent caught in a social faux pas. "I didn't mean it like that."

  "I know you didn't."

  They walked in silence for a few moments. "You've been to court," Johnny said.

  Kate nodded. "Many times."

  "What's it like?" Kate told him the truth. "Scary."

  His stride broke. "Scary?"

  "Sure." He didn't believe it. "You were scared?"

  She didn't smile. "The law's a serious business, Johnny. In a criminal case, the kind I testified in when I was working for your dad, what you say under oath can change someone's life forever. You have to be right.

  You bet it's scary."

  They reached the bridge over Fish Creek and paused to watch the incoming tide sweep slowly and inexorably up the muddy channel. Mutt left the trail to investigate the trees lining the creek bed. Mallard ducks pecked up the goose grass growing on the mud flats. A container ship slowed almost to a halt off Point Mackenzie, waiting for a berth at the Port of Anchorage. Behind Mackenzie, a hundred and thirty miles to the north, Denali, attended by the lesser peaks of Foraker and Hunter, rose clear and cold and white against the horizon. A hundred miles closer, Susitna lay peaceful and calm beneath a soft blanket of snow.

  "Susitna means ' lady," doesn't it?" Johnny said.

  Kate nodded.

  "Does a story go with it?" Kate smiled. "In Alaska, a story always goes with it, Johnny." "Tell me," he said.

  A bird appeared from behind the tops of a stand of scrub spruce, wings fixed in a graceful glide, fierce eyes searching the tide line for breakfast. The brown wings stretched seven feet wingtip to wingtip, and the white head gleamed in the first, tentative rays of the morning sun.

  Kate touched Johnny's arm and pointed. As she did, a second eagle slipped from behind the trees. The flocks of mallards became silent and very still, their fat bodies trying to blend in with the muddy bank. The first eagle slipped by, the second, both without striking.

  "Must not be that hungry," Johnny said.

  "Why work for it?" Kate said. "They're probably looking for dead salmon."

  "Kind of late for silvers," Johnny said, eyes squinting after the eagles as they banked to follow the gravel bed of the Alaska Railroad.

  "Kind of."

  "What then?"

  "Anything they can find." She grinned, remembering. "I saw one take off with a poodle, once."

  "Ick!"

  Kate shrugged. "Protein is protein."

  The eagles were lost around the bend of Bootlegger's Cove. An enormous spiral of Canadian geese massed over Knik Arm already at a thousand feet and ascending higher into the sky between Carin Point and Point Mackenzie. "Listen," Kate said. In the still, early morning air, the plaintive honks came clearly to where they were standing.

  Johnny's voice was soft. "Where are they going?"

  "British Columbia, Washington, Oregon. Some of them as far as northern California."

  "Thousands and thousands of miles. How do they know how to get there?

  How do they know?"

  Kate had no answer for him, and they watched in silence as the flock ended their upward spiral in a disciplined vee formation. The vee moved south, down the western side of Cook Inlet, by the long, still form of Susitna. A 737 roared off the runway at Anchorage International and the geese were heard no more. Johnny gave a long, drawn-out sigh. "So. Tell me."

  "Tell you what?"

  "The story that goes with Susitna."

  "Oh. Well, let me see. It's been a long time since I've heard it myself." Kate leaned on the bridge railing, looking for inspiration at the long, sweeping outline of the woman slumbering peacefully beneath a white coverlet. Her right profile faced them, her hands were clasped at her waist. If you looked closely enough you could almost see her breast rise and fall. "Once upon a time, a couple of days ago," Kate began, and without knowing it slipped into a faint echo of the rhythmic chant of the storyteller.